Baseball, You Have a BIG Problem

There was a time when the name Tommy John meant an excellent pitcher who happened to make history when he was the first patient to undergo an ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction (or UCL), a new procedure developed by the late Dr. Frank Jobe.   The operation was revolutionary and was named after John. Nowadays, for pitchers, the name Tommy John has mutated into the definition of a living nightmare and all of organized baseball should be petrified.

Matt Harvey

During the 20th century a torn elbow ligament was often referred to as a "dead arm injury" and depending on the severity usually meant the end of a career. Tommy John Surgery changed that bleak outlook by providing a fix for that scenario, the same way a torn rotator cuff once spelled doom for pitchers until all the wonderful things that science and medical research has made available changed that outcome for the better. Typical recovery time for UCL surgery is one year, give or take, and the success rate is over 90%. However, this has led to a false reliance on it because the number of cases has taken an alarming direction and has recently included young star pitchers like Washington's Stephen Strasburg, the Mets' Matt Harvey, Miami's 2013 N.L. Rookie of the Year Jose Fernandez and at the time of this writing, possibly Yankee sensation Masahiro Tanaka.
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During the time Spring Training opened through the first week of the regular season 11 pitchers had been diagnosed with torn elbow ligaments and were gone for the season, some for the second time. It's not restricted to pitchers either, as Marlins' shortstop Rafael Furcal and Orioles catcher Matt Wieters can attest. Considering the money-is-everything mentality of sports, this counter-productive development should be gaining more of an emergency effort to reverse it instead of maintaining an ill-advised dependency on surgery and rehab.

How did baseball go from having legendary fireballers like Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson having no such injuries in their long careers to what we're seeing now? The problem is easily traced to alterations over the years in dynamics and methods of pitching windups, particularly too much emphasis on arm strength instead of pushing off with the rear leg which Seaver and Ryan (pictured) used to great effect well into their 40s. Add to that the foolish notion that these "modern" techniques can allow starters to increase their velocity and work less innings while relievers can go for triple-digit speed, throwing harder between appearances, restrictive pitch counts that result in less innings to build up in-game physical endurance, and you have the makings of a rapidly spreading epidemic that could threaten the game more than performance enhancing drugs ever have.

Using PEDs is an individual's choice (and eventual risk), but shaving a year off a promising player's career due to universal training procedures authorized by the game itself shouldn't be considered a virtual right of passage. If you stop and think about it, that's the direction it's heading and a lot of young athletes will eventually start choosing a sport other than baseball, or at least give serious consideration to it. This problem has the potential to jeopardize the future of Major League Baseball when young players start getting forced out of the game before they even get their careers going.

MLB alone isn't to blame. Organized baseball at every level encourages young pitchers to throw hard starting as early as high school. They all better start getting major-league serious about solving this situation fast before they have to start dredging the Little Leagues for pitchers.